Exhibit: Carmen Winant: “The Neighbor, The Friend, The Lover”

THE NEIGHBOR. THE FRIEND, THE LOVER

The Contemporary Dayton is proud to present the US premiere of Ohio-based artist Carmen Winant’s The neighbor, the friend, the lover. Originally created for a group show at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, titled Witch Hunt, The neighbor, the friend, the lover employs found images to explore women’s sexuality as a source of power and agency as well as (and for this same reason) a threat to the state and the violent hetero-patriarchal dominion. In essence, the work opens an aperture onto the witch hunt as a misogynistic and often anti-sematic historical presence.

Consisting of found, double sided images illuminated on lightboxes and displayed in a darkened gallery, the exhibition’s suggestive presentation creates an ambiguous but at the same time poetic and finely tuned story. Revealing the often-invisible experiences of women as well as feminist strategies for survival, revolt, and self-determination, Winant aims to highlight the power of photography and print in representing how women view themselves and how the medium can serve as a tool in the struggle for individual autonomy and self-representation.

Winant is the Roy Lichtenstein Endowed Chair of Studio Art at Ohio State University and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photography. Her publications include My Birth, published concurrently with her break-through work of the same name in MoMA’s Being: New Photography 2018 and A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures published in conjunction with her 2022 exhibition at The Print Center, Philadelphia, and available in The Co Shop.